Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2015 Musicking New Orleans Street Musicians: A Methodology for Writing About Music Savannah Cadi Rose Ganster Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Ganster, Savannah Cadi Rose, "Musicking New Orleans Street Musicians: A Methodology for Writing About Music" (2015). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2832. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2832 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. MUSICKING NEW ORLEANS STREET MUSICIANS: A METHODOLOGY FOR WRITING ABOUT MUSIC A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Communication Studies by Savannah Cadi Rose Ganster B.A., Pennsylvania State University, 2010 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2012 May 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I began working on this project five years ago and without the guidance, encouragement, commitment, and effort of several people, it certainly would never have become the dissertation it is today. While no words of thanks will ever be enough, I would like to express my most sincere gratitude for the individuals who made this project possible. First and foremost, thank you to my advisor and mentor, Dr. Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, for guiding this project, for helping to shape its form from inception to final product, and for reading multiple drafts of this work as it morphed into a substantial piece of research. Without her guidance, suggestions, and encouragement this dissertation would not exist in its current form. I would like to thank the other members of my smart, witty, and insightful dissertation committee: Professor Mari Kornhauser, Dr. David Terry, Dr. Bryan McCann, and Dr. William Grimes. Thank you to my minor chair, Professor Mari Kornhauser, for her encouragement and kindness, and for believing in my writing abilities. She is a treasure trove of knowledge about New Orleans street musicians and without the suggestions she made during the prospectus meeting, this project would certainly be lacking. Thank you to Dr. David Terry for helping me to refine and articulate my research question. Because of his ability to navigate a project that was very much influx, I am now able to understand and discuss my project in clear and concise terms. I would like to thank Dr. Bryan McCann for challenging me to expand the scope of my inquiry to include sound and noise studies, and writings completed on the subject of music, noise, and sound by scholars in rhetoric, critical cultural theory, and other areas of study. As a result, this project has gained a much stronger theoretical foundation, which allows it to extend further than I had previously thought possible. Finally, I must thank Dr. William Grimes for suggesting that I look at Christopher Small’s book, Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and ii Listening. Without this book, I would certainly be lost. His input and encouragement were incredibly helpful as I was composing this dissertation. Truthfully, I could not have asked for a better dissertation committee. I would also like to thank the street musicians of New Orleans who allowed me to observe their performances and who consented to be interviewed for this project. Thank you for affording me the opportunity to understand your performances, your experiences, and your population in new ways. The community of New Orleans street musicians is filled with fascinating stories, amazing performances, enchanting music, and incredible people, and I am fortunate to have learned so much from and about it. Certainly I must thank my family for supporting my academic endeavors, for entertaining my lengthy ramblings about theory, performance, and this project, and for being there for me when I struggled along the way. I know that at times I must have bored you to tears with talk of things you knew nothing about, however, just having an ear to bend was helpful to my process. I am so grateful to you for being present with me as I talked about, ruminated on, griped about, laughed at, cried over, and celebrated moments in this lengthy and difficult journey. To my long-distance creative collaborator and friend, Ashley Beard, thank you for listening patiently as I read sections of my dissertation aloud into the telephone while muttering to myself and making edits to my work in real time. I cannot express how valuable your act of listening was to my process, nor how immensely helpful your suggestions were as I revised this work. Thank you for the time, support, and encouragement you offered to me as I stumbled forward with the composition of this dissertation. iii Finally, I want to thank my cats, Avalanche Phineas Cat and Sweets McFuzz, for their patience as I wrote, for keeping me grounded, for reminding me that a world outside of my work exists, and for cuddling up beside me in my times of victory and defeat. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………………….. ii ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………………. vi CHAPTER ONE: WRITING ABOUT MUSIC …………………………………………..………..…1 TWO: EXAMPLES OF POETIC AND PROSAIC DESCRIPTION ….………….........33 THREE: HISTORIES OF NEW ORLEANS STREET MUSICIANS ………….……...51 FOUR: CURRENT ACCOUNTS OF STREET MUSICIANS IN NEW ORLEANS …89 FIVE: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE …………..…………………………………… 129 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………………. 139 APPENDIX: IRB APPROVAL ……………………………………………………………… 147 VITA …………………………………………………………………………………………. 148 v ABSTRACT This project argues for the use of performative writing as a methodology for writing about musical performances. An analysis of recent scholarship on music and musical performances written by performance studies scholars supports the use of performative writing in texts that address musical performances. In order to further this methodological claim, this study uses performative writing to document both historical and present day accounts of musical performances of street musicians in New Orleans. Utilizing Foucault’s theories on and Roach’s model of genealogy, Bruner’s notion of reflexive ethnography, and Small’s concept of musicking, I theorize, on a meta-methodological level, that performative writing enhances genealogy and reflexive ethnographic research, while simultaneously acting as an extension of the music or musical performance about which it is written. vi CHAPTER ONE: WRITING ABOUT MUSIC The raspy ring of her voice catches the air, simultaneously tender and rough. The note rings out over the thrummed chords of her ukulele, a syncopated rhythm. Hers is the call of the crooner, her voice like a record from the 30s. My heart skips a beat, but the needle of her voice catches in its groove, and for a time she sings my heartbeat unknowingly. She sits in a doorway, her back to the green of the frame, singing a song I’ve never heard before. I’m tempted to call it the blues or folk music, but I can’t pin it down. Her dreadlocks pulled away from her face, I see beads of sweat shining on her brow. Her eyes closed, she smiles as she sings, her voice an emblem of a past neither she nor I ever knew first-hand, for we are both too young. The large yellow Labrador lying beside her shifts his pose before settling back into sleep. She beckons forth memories of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald with her soulful singing. Her warble cracks and she digs deep for that jagged texture of the low note channeling Janis Joplin for a moment. Then I realize that she’s singing Joplin’s “Stealin’” and I smile. “I’m stealin’, stealin’,/ Pretty mama don’t you tell on me./ I’m stealin’ back my same old used-to-be” (Joplin n.p.). I think about the way this performer recalls ghosts, history reverberating as she sings. Whether intentionally or not, she is a medium at a séance, allowing these women singers of the past, all long gone, to project their voices through her mouth. And yet, this music is hers. Her performance is not a reproduction of Janis Joplin’s song, but rather, it is a re-appropriation of it. History effuses the present, and in that seemingly beautiful way that coincidence occurs, I register the words of the chorus: “I’m stealin’ back my same old used-to-be” (Joplin n.p.). The words suggest a return to a former self, a remarkable departure to history from the present. Her performance, as I observe her, is a tangle of layers and complexity brimming with ghosts and 1 potential. I attempt to project her music onto the page through my writing, in much the same way that her song performs, projects, and cites a particular and partial history of female vocalists through its highly specific sound. I wonder how I can record a written account of the intricacies of this musical performance, which is infused with a multitude of voices, and I realize just how inadequate certain uses of language can be for the task of describing and depicting musical performance. The Difficulties and Failures of Writing About Music As scholars, on our best days, we use language as a tool. On our worst days, we wield language as a weapon. We revel in our ability to diminish and compress objects, events, performances, etc. into words, and when words fail us, when language fails us, we find ourselves frustrated. Music, by its very nature, is not confined to the discourse of language, but rather, as Jacques Attali notes, “music is inscribed between noise and silence” (19).